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Genre Fiction Monographs 

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FOR 

LOVE 

AND 

MONEY 

The Literary Art 

of the Harlequin 

Mills & Boon Romance 

Laura Vivanco 

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Humanities-Ebooks Genre Fiction Monographs 

Series Editor: John Lennard 

For Love and Money 

The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon 

Romance 

Laura Vivanco 

HEB ☼ Humanities-Ebooks

Copyright 

Text © Laura Vivanco 2011 

The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of 

this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 

1988. 

First published by Humanities-Ebooks LLP, 

Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE. 

This PDF ebook is available from http://www.humanities-ebooks. 

co.uk and from MyiLibrary.com. and EBSCO. A Kindle ebook in 

reflowable format is available from Amazon.combut the Pdf is recommended 

for its superior performance on larger devices such as the 

Kindle DX, Dell Streak, and Apple iPad. 

A paperback is available from Lulu.com and from all booksellers. 

The author and publisher have used their best efforts to ensure that 

external URLs given in this book are accurate and current. They are 

not, however, responsible for any of these websites, and can offer no 

guarantee that the sites remain live or the content appropriate. 

ISBN 978-1-84760-195-7 PDF 

ISBN 978-1-84760-196-4 PAPERBACK 

ISBN 978-1-84760-197-1 KINDLE

To every Harlequin Mills & Boon author who has ever been asked 

“When are you going to write a real novel?”

Contents 

Copyright 4 

Acknowledgements 8 

Introduction 11 

Chapter 1. Mimetic Modes 29 

Myth 29 

The Romance Mode 31 

The High-Mimetic Mode 34 

The Low-Mimetic Mode 37 

The Ironic Mode 43 

Determining Mode 47 

Realism: Settings and Details 48 

Realism and the Happy Ending 50 

Realism: Issues 54 

Variations Within a Single Mode 61 

Modal Counterpoint 66 

Chapter 2. Mythoi 75 

Mythoi and Modes 78 

High Mimetic 79 

Low Mimetic 81 

Ironic 84 

Adapting Mythoi 91 

Chapter 3. Metafiction 109 

Defending Romance and its Readers 113 

Claiming Kinship with Classics 127 

Romance as Part of Popular Culture 133

Chapter 4. Metaphors 151 

Building a Relationship 155 

The Flowering of Romance 164 

Woman as Garden 164 

Woman as Flower 169 

The Hunt of Love 175 

Love is a Journey: Marion Lennox’s Princess of Convenience 

(2005) 183 

Conclusion 199 

Bibliography 204 

Harlequin Mills & Boon Romances 204 

Other Texts Cited 212

8 For Love and Money 

Acknowledgements 

My funding body and our child have been a great source of encouragement 

and technical help. Their belief in my work has kept me going 

on days when I was mired in the Slough of Despond. 

It has been a pleasure to be published by HEB. John Lennard’s 

enthusiasm, efficiency and attention to detail have made this a 

better book. Any remaining errors and omissions are, of course, my 

responsibility and not his. 

I am grateful to be part of a community of romance scholars and 

I would particularly like to acknowledge the vital roles played by 

Sarah S. G. Frantz (President of the International Association for 

the Study of Popular Romance), Pamela Regis (Vice President of 

IASPR and the author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel), 

and Eric M. Selinger (Executive Editor of the Journal of Popular 

Romance Studies and founder of the ‘Teach Me Tonight’ blog) in 

ensuring that the field is a lively and expanding one. Sandra Schwab 

marched ahead of me, slaying baggy dragons, An Goris made me 

aware of John Lennard’s Of Modern Dragons and Kerstin Frank’s 

introduction to the thermodynamics of Georgette Heyer fired me with 

enthusiasm for metaphors. I can only wish to match jay Dixon’s vast 

hoard of knowledge about Mills & Boon. 

Over the course of writing this book I corresponded with a number 

of HM&B authors, including Pamela Browning, Julie Cohen, Jennifer 

Crusie, Jessica Hart, Marion Lennox, Nicola Marsh, Sandra Marton, 

Sabrina Philips, Michelle Styles, Claire Thornton and Kate Walker. 

Their kindness is much appreciated. 

The readers of the ‘Teach Me Tonight’ blog made me believe there 

was also an audience for this project. Many of them gave me new 

perspectives on, and information about, romances. Joanna Chambers 

read and commented on sections of the book. 

Alan Deyermond remains an inspiration. I miss his incisive 

comments and value the encouragement he gave me as I began

Laura Vivanco 9 

work on this project. My conversations with him, Louise Haywood 

and Iona McCleery encouraged me to believe that in stepping from 

Hispano-medievalism into popular romance scholarship, I was not 

taking one giant leap into a totally unrelated field. 

I would also like to acknowledge the use, on the cover, of an adapted 

version of J. Herrera’s Diseño 3D, rosa roja which was made available 

online under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence. 

The remixed version of the rose featured on the cover of this 

book is therefore available for use under the terms of that licence.


Abbreviations 

AD: Anno Domini (‘year of the Lord’) 

AIDS: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome 

BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation 

BC: Before Christ 

ESP: extra-sensory perception 

HIV: Human Immunodeficiency Virus 

HM&B: Harlequin Mills & Boon 

IASPR: International Association for the Study of Popular Romance 

M&B: Mills & Boon 

MS: manuscript 

NHS: National Health Service (UK) 

N.Sh.OED: New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 

OED: Oxford English Dictionary 

RCMP: Royal Canadian Mounted Police 

RWA: Romance Writers of America

Introduction 

When the editor of A Companion to Romance: From Classical to 

Contemporary (2004) “observed that: ‘Romance exists in degenerate 

form in works of the Mills & Boon type’”, Lynne Pearce responded: 

what is most degenerate is also most defining […]. Like it 

or not, it is the template originating in these mass-produced 

romances that has become the twenty-first-century’s base-line 

definition of romance. (521) 

The term ‘romance’, which “finds its origins in the French word 

romanz, meaning simply literature written in the vernacular, the romance 

language of French” (Saunders 2), has, however, been applied 

to a great many different types of literature: 

The word’s spectrum of meaning has to be wide to include 

Troilus and Criseyde, The Faerie Queene, The Mysteries of 

Udolpho and Lord Jim, all of which have been called romances. 

Keats and Hawthorne both claim the word for one of their 

works […]. One problem in discussing the romance is the 

need to limit the way the term is applied. (Beer 4–5) 

In this book the problem has been resolved by taking the novels published 

by Mills & Boon and Harlequin as “defining”: unless qualified 

in some way, any mention here of ‘romance’, ‘romances’ or ‘romance 

novels’ should be understood as referring to “works of the Mills & 

Boon type”. 

Mention will, however, be made of some of the works that have 

been recognised as relatives (some more distant than others) of the 

romance novel. Jean Radford, although she concedes that: 

It is possible to argue about ‘romance’ […] that there is no 

historical relationship between Greek ‘romances’, medieval


romance, Gothic bourgeois romances of the 1840s, late nineteenth 

century women’s romances and mass-produced romance 

fiction now—except the generic term. (8) 

nonetheless affirms that it “is also possible […] to give some weight 

to the claim that romance is one of the oldest and most enduring of 

literary modes which survives today” (8). If the claim is accepted, 

then popular mass-market romances, including Harlequin Mills & 

Boon (HM&B) romances, have extremely “deep taproots that lead all 

the way back through literary history to medieval romances, and to a 

pre-literary oral culture” (Holmes 6). 

The “Greek ‘romances’” to which Radford refers “were all written 

by and for the Greek-speaking population of the eastern Roman 

Empire, in the first, second and third centuries AD” (Williamson 

25). They include Heliodorus and Longus’s tales of “Chariclea and 

Theagenes, Daphnis and Chloe […] just a few of the lovers from 

centuries past who had delighted” (S. James 15) the heroine of 

Sophia James’s One Unashamed Night (2010). Their presence in this 

novel is one indication of modern authors’ awareness of the literary 

ancestors of HM&Bs; further proof of this awareness can be found 

in Chapter 3. 

What unifies texts: 

from Tristan and Iseult to the Harlequin series, is first the centrality 

of the love plot: what drives the plot, what motivates 

the turning of the pages, is the question of whether and how 

the two primary characters will achieve, or fail to achieve, a 

lasting union with each other. (Holmes 6) 

Romance novels, however, as published by HM&B and as defined by 

the Romance Writers of America (RWA), have both “a central love 

story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending”. Or, in 

the words of Daphne Clair and Robyn Donald (both prolific HM&B 

authors), they tell “a story in which the plot is driven by a sexually 

based emotional relationship between two people. And for most readers 

there has to be a happy ending—or at least the strong implication 

of future happiness” (1). 1 

1 The RWA definition focuses on the two main aspects of romances but some


Mills & Boon, or Harlequin as the company is known in Canada 

and the US, has a unique relationship with romance: 

Mills & Boon, the United Kingdom’s leading publisher of romantic 

fiction, is one hundred years old in 2008; and its parent 

company, Harlequin, celebrates sixty years in 2009. Over the 

years, both firms have become household names, their books 

enjoying the almost unique distinction of being requested by 

publisher, rather than author. In 1997, the phrase ‘Mills & 

Boon’, meaning a type of popular romantic novel, was added 

to the Oxford English Dictionary. (Bowring and O’Brien 8) 1 

Ken Gelder has also stressed the importance of the publisher’s brand: 

“Harlequin and Mills and Boon have long been synonymous with 

romance, and it can certainly seem as if the brand name of the publisher 

overshadows the writer, who is quite literally subsumed into 

industry” (44). 

It would be wrong, however, to believe that all HM&B authors are 

“subsumed” into the company. In Mills & Boon’s early years its list: 

included the great and the near-great, some of whom were given 

their first big ‘break’ by Mills & Boon: P. G. Wodehouse, 

Hugh Walpole, Victor Bridges, Jack London, E. F. Benson, 

Georgette Heyer, Denise Robins, and Constance Holme were 

all published by the firm. (McAleer, Passion’s Fortune 3) 

This is also true of HM&B in more recent decades: the company has 

numbered among its authors Sally Beauman, Jennifer Crusie, Victoria 

Holt, Jayne Ann Krentz, Mercedes Lackey, Rosamunde Pilcher 

and Nora Roberts. 2 In addition, there are plenty of HM&B authors 

analysts of the genre have attempted to identify smaller constituent parts of the 

novels. Pamela Regis has described “eight essential narrative events [which] 

provide a romance novel with its basic structure” and “Three other narrative 

events [which] are frequent but not essential” (38). George Paizis has also analysed 

“the building blocks of the narratives” (Love 6). 

1 An indication of Harlequin’s status as a “household name” in North America is 

provided by Kay Mussell, who has noted that “Criticizing a film, novel, or television 

program as a ‘Harlequin romance’ has become an automatic phrase of 

contempt by reviewers who may never have read a romance” (16–17). 

2 As ‘Vanessa James’ Sally Beauman wrote nine romances for HM&B in the 

1980s. Jennifer Crusie’s career as an author began with Harlequin in the early


who, while they remain virtually unknown to the general public, 

are ‘stars’ to the publisher’s regular readers. This is a fact of which 

HM&B is well aware and “As readers begin to develop a preference 

for certain authors, so new reading programs are made available to 

cater to these demands” (Harlequin, Harlequin 30 th 12). 1 

Nonetheless, the fame (or notoriety) of the Harlequin and Mills 

& Boon brands has led many to think reductively of HM&B books 

as merely marketable commodities produced by a company whose 

“success has been reinforced through the application to the publishing 

industry of techniques developed in other areas of commerce” (Paizis, 

“Category” 130). Joseph McAleer, for example, states that: 

The Mills & Boon imprint, like any successful commodity in 

a mass market, stands for a quality product, a kind of guarantee 

of an easy, thrilling, and satisfying read with an obligatory 

happy ending. This flavourful confection, wrapped in a 

brightly coloured paperback cover with a dreamy scene, is to 

many addictive in its escapist nature. (Passion’s Fortune 2) 

Thus, although HM&B romances have been described as “an economic 

art form” (Jensen 32), they have rarely been judged positively 

as a literary art form. Rather, as Ann Curthoys and John Docker commented 

in 1990: 

For most of this century romance fiction […] has been high 

literature’s Other, a negative icon, what not, what never to 

1990s. ‘Victoria Holt’ was, like ‘Jean Plaidy’ and ‘Philippa Carr’, a pseudonym of 

Eleanor Hibbert (1906–93), who wrote romances for Mills & Boon in the 1950s 

and early 1960s as ‘Eleanor Burford’. Jayne Ann Krentz, who also writes as 

‘Amanda Quick’ and ‘Jayne Castle’, wrote for Harlequin in the 1980s and early 

1990s. Mercedes Lackey was already well known for her fantasy fiction before 

the first of her Five Hundred Kingdoms series, The Fairy Godmother (2004), was 

published by Harlequin’s LUNA imprint. As ‘Jane Fraser’ Rosamunde Pilcher 

wrote ten novels for Mills & Boon between 1949 and 1963. Nora Roberts has 

recently been described as “a publishing phenomenon. She writes five books a 

year—a hardcover novel, a paperback trilogy, and a paranormal suspense under 

the pseudonym J. D. Robb” (Gagne-Hawes). According to Roberts, discovering 

Harlequin romances was a “wonderful moment in my life” (“The Romance” 

198). She began her career writing category romances for Silhouette prior to its 

acquisition by Harlequin in 1984, and she remained with HM&B for many years. 

1 Such ‘star’ authors include Betty Neels, whose novels have been reprinted in 

special “Collector’s Editions”.


be. Newspaper critics in reviews, journalists in their columns, 

good professional-middle-class people in their conversation, 

would casually snap at a book or passage by saying things like 

‘it unfortunately smacks of Mills and Boon’, or, ‘in certain 

parts of the novel it lapses into pure Mills and Boon’. ‘Mills 

and Boon’ was a roaming, punitive signifier, a terrier running 

around and around the boundary that separates serious writing 

from the low, from sub-literature, para-literature, trash, schlock. 

‘Mills and Boon’ meant embarrassingly ‘bad’ writing, 

sentimental, over-explicit, slushy, sloppy, the lush, the unforgivable. 

(Curthoys & Docker) 

Many critics, including Daphne Watson and Kate Ellis, would doubtless 

have preferred to see the terrier impounded: the former believed 

that HM&B romance had crossed some literary boundary and was “a 

kind of subliterary form” (91), while the latter stated that “Harlequin 

romances […] are about as far from ‘great books’ as it is possible to 

get” (749). 

Similarly scathing assessments of this particular publisher’s list 

continue to be expressed: 

In the literary world, Mills and Boon has long been the black 

sheep. Its books—to call them novels would be to raise them 

far above their station—are lightweight, the plots recycled 

and the endings predictable and to read them is a waste of precious 

life. (Freeman) 

Having spent a great deal of time reading HM&B romances, I would 

argue that many are well-written, skilfully crafted works which can 

and do engage the minds as well as the emotions of their readers, 

and a few are small masterpieces—as I shall show. I follow in the 

footsteps of John G. Cawelti who considered “popular formulas to 

be of more complex artistic and cultural interest than most previous 

commentators have indicated” (Adventure 2) and stated that “it is 

possible to examine individual works of popular culture as unique 

artistic creations” (“The Concept” 382). 1 My choice of “individual 

1 Cawelti himself wrote little about the romance genre; in his Adventure, Mystery, 

and Romance he chose “to deal rather intensively with a few major formulas—


works” has been influenced by availability: most of the HM&Bs to 

which I refer were published in the UK in recent years. Nevertheless, 

the corpus of romances on which I draw spans seven decades and 

includes many novels edited in the US or Canada. I have also been 

guided by the need to quote from novels that provide clear examples 

of the topics under discussion. 

In analysing literary modes I have drawn heavily on the work of 

Northrop Frye, who observed that “Value-judgments are subjective 

[…]. When they are fashionable or generally accepted, they look 

objective, but that is all” (20). The truth of this is demonstrated by 

the history of the critical reception of an earlier form of romance 

literature, cancionero love poetry: 

For many years Hispanists have tended to assume that the 

huge numbers of lyric poems written in the fifteenth century—the 

so-called cancionero poetry, the work of some 700 

poets—were nothing more than, as it were, academic exercises 

ringing the changes on the trivial niceties of courtly love. 

(Wardropper 182) 

Keith Whinnom, however, set out to prove that: 

(1) the technical expertise of the composers of canciones is 

considerable; (2) the poets of the end of the fifteenth century 

accept in the canción a series of technical restrictions which 

make the canción at once a more exacting and a more concise 

form; (3) simultaneously they restrict their vocabulary to a 

very limited range of abstract terms; (4) the majority of modern 

critics who have looked at this verse have either dismissed 

it as vacuous and insipid or have singled out for enthusiastic 

approval poems which in form or content are quite untypical, 

and cannot be taken as representative of the aesthetic ideal of 

the period. (127) 

Despite his work, attitudes to cancionero poetry were slow to shift 

and in 1998 Julian Weiss observed that: 

various forms of detective and crime stories, the western, and the best-selling 

social melodrama” (2).


much of the work done on the cancioneros is still rooted in 

largely unexamined assumptions about literary canons, esthetic, 

social, and political categories and values. This is poetry 

that since the early nineteenth century has occupied a liminal 

space in the minds of critics. […] The history of cancionero 

studies is a measure of our evolving notions of “literature” 

and “culture,” since much of the interpretative criticism has 

been designed to vindicate or deny its status as “art.” (3) 

HM&B romances differ in many ways from late medieval cancionero 

poetry but both, despite being hugely popular with their intended 

audiences, have often been carelessly denigrated by modern scholars. 

As for the authors of these works, Ian Macpherson has noted of 

the cancionero poets that “I am personally convinced that many 

[…] were considerably more enterprising and ambitious […] than 

they have generally been given credit for” (62); one could say the 

same of romance novelists. In addition, both HM&B romances and 

cancionero love poetry are large bodies of work comprised of texts 

with “concise form[s]”. Although the lengths of HM&Bs vary, they 

are generally “concise” novels and the constraints imposed by their 

commercial niche prompted Jennifer Crusie, who has written for 

Harlequin, to compare them to poems: “Category [romance] is an 

elegant, exacting, exciting form of fiction. It requires precise pacing, 

tight plotting, and exquisitely brief characterizations. It is truly as 

fine a form for fiction as the sonnet is for poetry” (“So, Bill”). Dirk 

de Geest and An Goris have suggested that there are grounds for 

considering romances to be a type of “constrained writing”, a term 

which “designates a form of literary production in which the writer 

submits his or her text to specific formal (and to a lesser extent also 

thematic) constraints” (82). 

In the case of HM&B authors, many of the “specific formal (and 

to a lesser extent also thematic) constraints” are imposed by the 

publisher. Although Mills & Boon Limited, founded by Gerald Mills 

(1877–1928) and Charles Boon (1877–1943) in London in 1908, 

began its existence as a small general publisher, over time it came 

to specialise in romance novels. In 1957 Harlequin Books Limited, a 

small Canadian “printer, packager, and book distributor […] founded


in 1949 by Richard Bonnycastle” (McAleer, Passion’s Fortune 116– 

17), purchased the Canadian reprint rights for several Mills & Boon 

romances. Harlequin had also begun by printing works in a variety 

of genres, but it too came to specialise in romance as the business 

relationship between the two companies grew ever closer: in “1963 

Harlequin published a non-Mills & Boon author for the last time” and, 

on “1 October 1971, Harlequin acquired Mills & Boon” (McAleer, 

Passion’s Fortune 120, 139). The Mills & Boon brand, however, 

was retained and is used in the Australian, Indian, New Zealand and 

UK markets, while many of the company’s romances continue to be 

edited at Mills & Boon’s UK offices. In July 1984, Harlequin bought 

Silhouette Books from Simon & Schuster (Thurston 64) and until 

April 2011 Silhouette continued to exist as one of Harlequin’s many 

imprints: 

Harlequin sells books under several imprints including Harlequin, 

Silhouette, MIRA, […] Steeple Hill, LUNA and HQN. 

[…] In late 2005, Harlequin acquired the assets of BET Books, 

a leading publisher of African-American women’s fiction. 

These titles will be published by Harlequin under the Kimani 

Press imprint. (Torstar, 2005 Annual Report 25) 

Despite the fact that HM&B is best known for its ‘category’ or ‘series’ 

romances, some of these imprints publish ‘single title’ novels 

and the company therefore: 

publishes books in both series and single title formats. Series 

titles are published monthly in mass-market paperback format 

under an imprint that identifies the type of story to the reader. 

Each series typically has a preset number of titles that will 

be published each month. The single title publishing program 

provides a broader spectrum of content in a variety of formats 

(mass-market paperback, trade paperback, hardcover) and is 

generally a lengthier book. (Torstar, 2010 Annual Report 12). 1 

1 It should be noted that not all of the books published by HM&B are romances. 

According to Harlequin’s website, the company “publishes over 110 titles a 

month […]. These books are written by over 1,200 talented authors worldwide, 

offering women a broad range of reading from romance to bestseller fiction, 

from young adult novels to erotic literature, from nonfiction to fantasy” (“About


Each series, or ‘line’, has its own guidelines which provide details 

about elements such as settings, levels of explicit sexual reference, 

and plot, which distinguish it from the other lines. Some lines specialise 

in particular areas, such as historical romance, medical romance, 

romantic suspense, and paranormal romance. These guidelines, then, 

serve as detailed descriptions of the constraints within which authors 

must work while still producing distinctive and emotionally engaging 

work. 

It may be helpful to compare HM&B authors to the Godmothers in 

Mercedes Lackey’s The Fairy Godmother (2004), a romantic fantasy 

novel published under Harlequin’s LUNA imprint. In the lands of the 

Five Hundred Kingdoms all of life is affected by a magic force known 

as “The Tradition” (58) which attempts to shape events to make them 

fit the patterns set by folktales, ballads, and other forms of traditional 

literature. The role of the Godmothers is to “see to it that the conditions 

are fulfilled to make things as pleasant as possible for everyone” (68). 

In order to achieve this they must become conversant with all aspects 

of “The Tradition” and a significant part of a Godmother’s training 

therefore involves making herself “familiar with every tale that any 

Godmother has ever been involved with” (90). 

Guides to writing romance novels suggest a similar programme 

of training for romance authors: Daphne Clair and Robyn Donald 

warn the aspiring author “Don’t try to write romances if you’ve never 

read one; you need to immerse yourself in them so you can recognise 

the clichés to avoid” (2), and Catherine Wade similarly suggests 

“Read as many novels as you can, selecting them from as many of 

the different types of romances as possible and reading the work of a 

large variety of authors” (15). 1 Harlequin explicitly advises would-be 

HM&B authors to read a wide range of their romances: 

we expect you to enjoy reading romance fiction. If you are 

already a fan, your appreciation for this type of book will be 

apparent in your writing. If you have not done so already, we 

encourage you to read many, many books from each series. 

Harlequin”). 

1 Catherine Wade writes for the Mills & Boon Modern/Harlequin Presents line of 

romances under the name ’Kate Walker’.


The series that emerges as your favorite is probably the one to 

which you should submit your manuscript. (“Writing Guidelines: 

How to”) 

Although it might be argued that by packaging the novels into ‘lines’, 

each with its own set of guidelines, HM&B restricts its authors’ artistic 

freedom, this in fact suggests that authors are encouraged to 

choose whichever line best suits their particular writing ‘voice’. 

It should also be noted that HM&B’s guidelines have not remained 

constant. McAleer describes one period of change, following 

Harlequin’s acquisition of Mills & Boon, in which: 

some of the authors who started their Mills & Boon careers 

in a more ‘chaste’ time […] were faced with the new requirements 

of the Harlequin era. ‘A lot of our authors who could 

not handle sex started to handle it,’ Boon said. ‘They probably 

read some of the authors who could and imitated it.’ Ethel 

Connell (‘Katrina Britt’) admitted that some of the older authors 

did just that: ‘A lot of the authors used to read each other, 

like in school. They’d have to copy the frisky bits.’ (Passion’s 

Fortune 287) 

Those who begin by imitating, however, may ultimately master the 

new techniques and themselves produce innovative novels. McAleer 

cites Anne Weale as an example of an author who “made the transition 

successfully” (Passion’s Fortune 287) and “demonstrated her 

newfound talents in two ground-breaking novels” (288). Although 

the casual or infrequent reader is perhaps more apt to perceive the 

similarities between HM&B novels, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén suggests 

that: 

a very real experience of originality and individuality […] exists, 

not as a result of readers being tricked or duped into consumption 

and reading, but as a tangible reality stemming from 

an acquired reading competence that allow[s] texts that are 

written within category romance to be understood as different 

from one another, as having something unique in them. In a 

way, a text should adhere to the requirements of a particular 

line, but also in a sense break out of that frame. (74)

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